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How gaming can help with your child's development

By Steve Fox, Digital First Media

Posted:
09/25/2013 02:52:12 AM MDT

Updated:
09/25/2013 11:14:08 AM MDT

(Steve Fox)

About six months ago, a good friend of mine put a call out on Facebook asking friends whether it was a good idea for his 12-year-old son to join the game craze known as Minecraft. I jokingly said "NOOOOOO!!!"

If you have a teenager or pre-teen, you have more than likely heard of Minecraft and the entrancing effect it has on young people. My reaction to my friend's query was more a reaction to the amount of time my 15-year-old son has spent on Minecraft since he started playing it three years ago. Like most parents of my generation, I often find myself telling my kids about how I spent much of my free time as a child outdoors, playing any number of different games. Such pleas for outdoor time usually result in eyerolls and not much more.

34 percent of boys play two-plus hours a day while 18 percent of girls do.

54 percent of 12- to 14-year-olds play on any given day while 46 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds do.

And that study is from five years ago!

Parents are in a near constant battle for the time of their teenagers over electronics. Minecraft feels like one of those time-sucks where if you turn away for a few hours, your child is still playing.

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Yet as I began to learn about Minecraft, mostly by listening to my son and his buddies chat about it, I realized this was wildly different from the traditional violent video games sometimes favored by teenagers. Minecraft, while exhibiting some violent elements, is not Black Ops or Grand Theft Auto – games where parents are barraged with the sounds of gunfire and death.

Minecraft is in many ways educational. Players "mine" for elements and spend much of their time building communities. Elements of math, engineering, architecture and social engineering are present within the game.

Over time, I've been able to set boundaries on how much time my son spends on the game. On school nights, he has to finish his homework before he logs on to any Minecraft servers. When I asked him to guess how much time he spends on the game, he said his sessions last anywhere from five minutes to three hours. When I asked him "Why?" he said the competitive nature of the game hooks him. It's a positive, learning competitiveness though, not the need to shoot and kill everything in sight. And, that's a difference that's important to me.

Around the world, Minecraft is being used to educate children on everything from science to city planning to speaking a new language, said Joel Levin, co-founder and education director at the company TeacherGaming. TeacherGaming runs MinecraftEdu, which is intended to help teachers use the game with students.

He followed it up with another post on the reactions he received. One would expect that the comments board would be swamped by negative comments from parents and others. That wasn't the case. Bilton received support from both parents and children, including this response from 13-year-old Joseph Moulton:

I've been playing this game for almost 3 years now (Since Feb. 2011), and being 13, I've pretty much been growing up on it. Minecraft has introduced tons and tons of new things into my life, such as programming, proper language skills (heh), and some negative stuff as well. These are the people that inspired me to learn Java, the language Minecraft is written in. Since then, I've learned all I can about computer programming, learning languages such as PHP, CSS, C#, and Python.

And, really, that has been my hope. I've mentioned to my son and his buddies more than a few times that they should learn programming and set up their own games. He's shown some interest, and I'm hoping he pursues programming in the near future. He's also asked me to play with him – a suggestion that Bilton also floated in his column.

So, maybe I've been going about this all wrong. I live and work in an electronic world, and I try to share that with my children. Maybe I need them to share their world with me. I'm going to give Minecraft a shot. I'll let you know how it goes.

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